France remains, as it looks ahead to the 2027 presidential race, a country still searching for political clarity. Its municipal elections were not, despite some of the commentary that followed, a decisive defeat for Marine Le Pen’s far right. Nor were they expected to be. But in the rush to overstate their significance, something more useful risks being missed: a series of left-wing victories that offer an instructive, if partial, road map for pushing back against that threat, and for presenting a credible alternative to its surface-level culture war politics. The question is whether those lessons travel across the Channel.
What the left actually won – and how
Municipal elections in France are local contests, but they matter because they test something deeper: organisation, discipline, and whether a political movement can translate its values into something voters can actually recognise in their daily lives.
What they tested this time, in city after city, was whether the left could do something it has often struggled to do in the face of rising populism: offer a clear, grounded, credible alternative, rather than simply positioning itself as the thing that is not the far right.
In Paris, the left held firm. Socialist Emmanuel Grégoire defeated conservative rival Rachida Dati, continuing a quarter-century of left-led rule in the capital. His campaign focused on everyday concerns: housing, transport, public safety. It was built on a coalition of Socialists, Greens and Communists with a clear programme, rather than a loose alignment of convenience.
Just as important was how that message was delivered. On the night of his victory, he was filmed cycling through the city, a small moment but a telling one. It reinforced an image of familiarity and ease, of someone who felt part of the place rather than apart from it. That matters more than is often acknowledged. Voters respond not just to policy, but to whether a candidate feels credible and rooted in the place they are asking to represent.
In Marseille, the lesson was even clearer. Benoît Payan sought to win over hard-left voters without embracing the party itself, a distinction that mattered. He campaigned as a bulwark, not a bureaucrat. His victory speech captured it plainly: a city many had written off had shown it could still resist.
That is not the language of technocracy. It is the language of a politics that understands a simple truth. People need something to vote for, not just something to vote against.
That kind of politics is built from the ground up. It means meeting people where they are, not where you wish they were. It means organising locally, listening seriously, and building a base that recognises itself in what you are offering. Without that, even the most coherent programme remains abstract.
The coalition that worked – and the one that didn’t
Coalition-building was central to these victories, but the coalition that worked was not the broadest possible one. It was the most disciplined.
In Marseille, the hard-left candidate withdrew before the second round to avoid splitting the vote. In Paris, Grégoire went further. He rejected any alliance with Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise and instead deliberately courted moderate and centre-right voters.
That decision was not just tactical. It was political. Mélenchon remains a deeply divisive figure in French politics. He is admired by parts of the left for his energy and rhetoric, but viewed by many voters as confrontational, erratic, and electorally toxic beyond his core base. His party carries that perception with it.
It worked. LFI ran independently and finished a distant third.
Then look at where that discipline broke down.
In Toulouse, the left secured a majority of the first-round vote and still lost. Elsewhere, candidates tied too closely to Mélenchon’s brand were defeated in cities the left might reasonably have expected to hold.
The majority was there. The strategy wasn’t.
François Hollande warned that “unity for the sake of unity” would lead the left into an impasse. He was right, and it should not have needed saying.
The problem with the hard left is not its energy, or even many of its ideas. It is its political effect. In a climate where the far right thrives on cultural and ideological confrontation, a figure like Mélenchon, and a movement shaped in his image, risk reinforcing exactly the polarisation the populists depend on.
We see a version of this in Britain too. Movements and figures that build strong support in particular pockets of the electorate, among younger voters, activists, and in certain urban centres, can still prove deeply polarising elsewhere. That allows the right to weaponise their presence and define the left by its most contentious edges.
It muddies the message. And in politics, a muddied message is usually a losing one.
The Reform problem – and what France tells us about it
Which brings us to Britain.
Reform UK’s voters are not all united by a coherent ideology. My own view is that they are united by something simpler: frustration. A sense that the system does not work for them, that nobody is listening, and that nothing meaningful ever changes. It is too easy to paint politics in big sweeping brushstrokes; doing so ignores the nuance of the individual, and the complexity of our respective ideologies.
Many of them know Reform is chaotic. They vote for it anyway.
Not because they believe in it, but because they want the system to feel their contempt.
This is not new. In 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen reached the second round of the French presidential election not because France had turned extremist, but because millions of voters used their ballot as a form of protest. It was a way of forcing a political class they felt had ignored them to finally pay attention.
Taken far enough, the protest vote becomes something harder to contain.
Drive through the towns of Northumberland and County Durham, and across the North East more broadly, and you see places that have watched industry disappear, high streets hollow out, and investment flow elsewhere. The question is not why people are angry. It is why we are still surprised by it.
The voters who are waiting
Those who have drifted from Labour to Reform have not suddenly done so out of conviction alone. They have done so out of disappointment.
That is the crucial point.
These are not lost voters. They are waiting voters.
Waiting for someone to turn up. To listen. To demonstrate, not declare, that their town matters and their lives are understood.
The moderate left is better placed than anyone to reach them, but only if it is willing to do the work. That means grassroots organisation in places that have been written off, communication that actually reaches people, and a politics rooted in proximity. It needs to be local, specific and deliverable.
Not grand ideological gestures, but tangible change.
An imperfect roadmap – but a roadmap nonetheless
France has not solved this problem. Even as the left held major cities, the far right continues to consolidate elsewhere. The ceiling has held, but the floor is rising.
But in the contrast between Marseille and Toulouse, between discipline and fragmentation, it has shown something important. The left wins when it selects candidates who can communicate clearly, builds programmes that speak to everyday concerns, and organises from the ground up. It wins when it understands how it looks as well as what it says.
Coalition-building is part of that, but it is not straightforward. France’s two-round system creates space for negotiation, withdrawal, and consolidation between ballots. The UK offers no such mechanism. First-past-the-post makes coordination harder, riskier, and often politically thankless. But the underlying principle still holds. Clarity matters more than breadth, and discipline matters more than theoretical unity.
The British left has a long history of losing arguments it should have won. It has a habit of prioritising ideological purity over electoral reality.
Whether it is capable of that same discipline is an open question.
But the voters are still there.
The disillusioned. The overlooked. The ones who voted Reform not out of belief, but because nobody else made them feel worth fighting for.
They have not gone anywhere.
They are waiting.
